David Gibbins - The Last Gospel

‘That’s what worried me.’ Jack rolled out a laminated small-scale Admiralty chart of the Mediterranean over the equipment on the floor of the boat, pinning its corners under loose diving weights. He jabbed his finger at the centre of the chart. ‘Here we are. The island of Sicily. Bang in the middle of the Mediterranean, the apex of ancient trade. Right?’

‘Go on.’

‘Our little Roman merchantman, wrecked against this cliff with its cargo of north African olive oil and fish sauce. It does the trip to Rome three, maybe four times a year, during the summer sailing season. Up and down, up and down. Almost always within sight of land, Tunisia, Malta, Sicily, Italy.’

‘Not a long-distance sailor.’

‘Right.’ Jack stabbed his finger at the far corner of the chart. ‘And here’s Egypt, the port of Alexandria. Fifteen hundred miles away to the east of us, across open sea. Everything points to the drug chest coming from there. The wood’s Egyptian acacia. Some of the phials had Coptic letters on them. And the opium was almost certainly shipped to the Mediterranean via the Red Sea ports of Egypt, a trade in exotic eastern spices and drugs that reached its height in the first century AD.’

‘The time of St Paul,’ Costas murmured. ‘Why we’re here.’

‘Right.’ Jack traced his finger along the coastline of north Africa from Egypt. ‘Now it’s possible, just possible, that the opium was shipped along the African coast from Alexandria to Carthage, and then went north to Sicily in our little merchantman.’

Costas shook his head. ‘I remember the navigational advice in the Mediterranean Pilot from my stint in the US Navy. Prevailing onshore winds. That desert coastline between Egypt and Tunisia has always been a death trap for sailors, avoided at all costs.’

‘Precisely. Ships leaving Alexandria for Rome sailed north to Turkey or Crete and then west across the Ionian Sea to Italy. The most likely scenario for our opium cargo is one of those ships, blown south-west from the Ionian Sea towards Sicily.’

Costas looked perplexed, then his eyes suddenly lit up. ‘I’ve got you! We’re looking at two overlapping shipwrecks!’

‘It wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve dived on ships’ graveyards with dozens of wrecks jumbled together, smashed against the same reef or headland. And once that idea clicked, I began to see other clues. Take a look at this.’ Jack reached down into a crate beside him and picked up a heavy item swaddled in a towel. He handed it across to Costas, who sat up on the pontoon and took the item on to his lap, then began carefully lifting the folds of towelling away.

‘Let me guess.’ He stopped and gave Jack a hopeful look. ‘A golden disc covered with ancient symbols, leading us to another fabulous lost city?’

Jack grinned. ‘Not quite, but just as precious in its own way.’

Costas raised the last fold and held the object up. It was about ten inches high, shaped like a truncated cone, and weighed heavily in his hands. The surface was mottled white with patches of dull metallic sheen, and at the top was a short extension with a hole through it like a retaining loop. He eyed Jack. ‘A sounding lead?’

‘You’ve got it. A lead weight tied to the end of a line for sounding depths. Check out the base.’

Costas carefully held the lead upside down. In the base was a depression about an inch deep, as if the lead had been partly hollowed out like a bell, and below that was a further depression in a distinctive shape. Costas raised his eyes again. ‘A cross?’

‘Don’t get too excited. That was filled with pitch or resin, and was used to pick up a sample of sea-bed sediment. If you were heading for a big river estuary, the first appearance of sand would act as a navigational aid.’

‘This came from the wreck below us?’

Jack reached across and took back the sounding lead, holding it with some reverence. ‘My first ever major find from an ancient shipwreck. It came from one end of the site, nestled in the same gully where we later found the drug chest. At the time I was over the moon, thought this was a pretty amazing find, but I assumed sounding leads were probably standard equipment on an ancient merchantman.’

‘And now?’

‘Now I know it was truly exceptional. Hundreds of Roman wrecks have been discovered since then, but only a few sounding leads have ever been found. The truth is they would have been expensive items, and only really of much use for ships regularly approaching a large estuary, with a shallow sea bed for miles offshore where alluvial sand could be picked up well before land was sighted.’

‘You mean like the Nile?’

Jack nodded enthusiastically. ‘What we’re looking at here is the equipment of a large Alexandrian grain ship, not a humble amphora carrier.’ He carefully placed the lead back in the crate, then pulled out an old black-bound book from a plastic bag. ‘Now listen to this.’ He opened the book to a marked page, scanned up and down for a moment and then began to read: ‘“But when the fourteenth night was come, as we were driven to and fro in the sea of Adria, about midnight the sailors surmised that they were drawing near to some country; and they sounded, and found twenty fathoms; and after a little space, they sounded again, and found fifteen fathoms. And fearing lest haply we should be cast ashore on rocky ground, they let go four anchors from the stern, and prayed for the day.”’

Costas whistled. ‘The Gospels!’

‘The Acts of St Paul, Chapter 27.’ Jack’s eyes were ablaze. ‘And guess what? Directly offshore from where we are now, the bottom slopes off to deep water, but diagonally to the south there’s a sandy plateau extending about three hundred metres out, about forty metres deep.’

‘That’s a hundred and twenty feet, twenty fathoms,’ Costas murmured.

‘On our last day of diving twenty years ago we did a recce over it, just to see if we’d missed anything,’ Jack said. ‘The very last thing I saw was two lead anchor shanks, unmistakably early Roman types used to weigh down wooden anchors. By the time of our north African amphora wreck, anchors were made of iron, so we knew these must have been lost by an earlier ship that had tried to hold off this coast.’

‘Go on.’

‘It gets better.’

‘I thought it would.’

Jack read again: ‘ “And casting off the anchors, they left them in the sea, at the same time loosing the bands of the rudders; and hoisting up the foresail to the wind, they made for the beach. But lighting on a place where two seas met, they ran the vessel aground; and the foreship struck and remained unmoveable, but the stern began to break up by the violence of the waves.” ’

‘Good God,’ Costas said. ‘The drug chest, the sounding lead. Stored in the forward compartment. What about the stern?’

‘Wait for it.’ Jack grinned, and pulled out a folder from the bag. ‘Fast-forward two millennia. August 1953, to be exact. Captain Cousteau and Calypso.’

‘I was wondering when they were going to come in to it.’

‘It was the clue that brought us here in the first place,’ Jack said. ‘They dived all along this coast. Here’s what the chief diver wrote about this headland. “I saw broken amphoras, concreted into a fold in the cliff, then an iron anchor, concreted to the bottom and apparently in corroded state, with amphora sherds on top.” That’s exactly what we found here, the Roman amphora wreck. But there’s more. On their second dive, they saw “des amphores grecques, en bas profound”.’

‘Greek amphoras, in deep water,’ Costas murmured. ‘Any idea where?’

‘Straight out from the cleft in the rock behind us,’ Jack said. ‘We reckoned they hit seventy, maybe eighty metres depth.’